UsersofLaTeX
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In late October 2003 I asked the Mac Tex list why they used LaTeX especially in relation to the almost ubiquitous Word....these are the responses I got...most of the links to words like quality will not be relevant (but some of the computer related ones will be). Full names ahve been removed to prevent any misunderstandings/coincidences and some of the more virulent comments about Microsoft Word and, well, Word and its masters have been removed in case they are deemed insuitable for what is essentially a teaching page...
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The user list is at:
<http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/> for list
guidelines, information, and LaTeX/TeX resources.
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My own experience is on the page MyUseOfLatex
and the other replies were:
I am using TeX and TeXShop about every day for as many of my needs as possible. I am a conservation biologist, and most of my TeX use is for producing written documents like reports, proposals and handouts for my students. I've been using TeXShop for about 6-9 months now, and have grown steadily proficient, but I still have much to learn, especially doing figures and graphics, my next goal.
Few of my biological colleagues here at Cornell use TeX, but everyone does like the quality of the output (finished product). In the building that I work in, only one other soul uses TeX, and he's a biologist with a very mathematical bent (a MS in physics work)!
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AFAIK, (La)TeX is used by many linguists (like myself). When it comes to formal semantics, we need a lot of symbols which are nicely integrated in LaTeX. In syntax, LaTeX packages like pstricks or qtree allow for easy structure generation. For phonologists, there is TIPA which contains all necessary phonetic symbols.
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I am a graduate student in Political Science in Atlanta, Georgia.
I use TeX for my papers because a) I'm a programmer anyway; b) I like having absolute control over the finished product; c) no other word processor lets me produce even simple fractions other than 1/2 or 1/4, let alone game theoretic models or more-complex equations; c) TeX does a great job with leading, kerning, and ligatures that one can only get from applications like PageMaker, Quark XPress, etc.; and d) it ain't Microsoft (though on a side note, I still really like Excel).
TeX also meshes very nicely with the statistical analysis applications we use for our quantitative work (mostly Stata and R). Thus, where creating tables in Excel consumes a lot of time, and produces amateurish output, creating tables from Stata or R is nearly effortless and looks very polished.
My friends in the Mathematics department tell me that using TeX is required for their major papers and theses.
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Its more or less universal in my field (computer aided geometric design).
Many conferences insist on it, and reject papers in Word.
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- I use it for work
- We are a small company doing engineering consulting for water treatment and also sell products in this field
- We use LaTeX for: quotations, reports, user's manuals, presentations, fax, letters, internal procedures, invoices, etc.
- I do not know a single other company which uses LaTeX
- We have to train employees on LaTeX, as LaTeX user's are rare and far in between
- All our clients/suppliers/competitors use M$ Word
- All those people regularly express admiration about our documents and ask us if they can get the M$ Word template we have used (or the M$ PowerPoint model)
- Often clients make comments about " you people wasting time to write reports using a strange software" and I have difficulties explaining that in fact to write long and complex documents LaTeX allows us to work MUCH faster
- Often clients / suppliers send us M$ Word files and we have use OpenOffice to open them
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It is impossible to write (theoretical) physics articles without TeX or LaTeX. In fact, many Journals offer TeX-style files that define lay-out parameters for their articles.
In general, Unix and now Linux are much used in the scientific world (albeit frequently in parallel with MS, on dual boot machines or using software (e.g. VMWare) that allows one to have both OS on the same computer simulatenously), and hence they have done and will do without MS-software. MS-Word is not a competitor in this field at all. It is for the secretary.
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popular in the Physics community, although competing with MS Word (depends a bit on the sub-disciplines).
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I am a Math teacher in a lycée (High School) in France. Among fifteen math teachers, I am the only one who uses LaTeX to write documents. Among my friends, I know two teachers who use regularly LaTeX. People are very impressed by the quality of documents produced with LaTeX but when I show us the source, they declined any help for beginning TeX.
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LaTeX is almost universally used in logic, heavily in formal semantics, and is gaining ground in linguistics. And you might even see some philosophy papers written in LaTeX ;-)
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The TeXshowcase: <http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/> shows some range of the uses of TeX with examples. It is absolutely essential for mathematics.
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LaTeX is universally used for papers in mathematics and physics. Most journals prefer and many insist on LaTeX or AMSTeX format (AMSTeX is a version of TeX developed by the American Math Society, very similar to, and basically compatible with. LaTeX). No one in their right mind uses MS Word for technical typing.
The actual preparation of a LaTeX document can be done in any word processor, Alpha and BBEdit are two of the most popular, but certainly MSWord or Appleworks (Mac) work just fine for this, since it is just straight nontechnical typing (formulas are inserted using standard stuff, e.g., $ u_{x} - u_{y} = e^{xy}$, which translates as $ = "math stuff", u sub x minus u sub y equals e to the power x times y, $ = "end of math stuff". This displays in LaTeX as a beautifully composed math formula.
I had the pleasure of attending grad school with Don Knuth who invented TeX. He was disgusted with the sheer ugliness of computer-generated technical pages, and so he went back and read up on the entire history of typesetting and creation of fonts. I then created a set of attractive fonts using a mathematical technique called spline fitting (I believe these fonts are now known as CM for computer modern, but they may have changed a lot from the early days.
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I'm responding to your query about Latex use in different academic fields. I'm in theoretical linguistics. When I started out, about 10 years ago, there were very few Latex users in the field. I had done an M.A. in math before starting linguistics, so that's where I knew Latex from. In recent years, though, I know of a number of people who switched to Latex from MS Word. Still MS Word is dominant, but less so. Maybe 10% of the people in the field use Latex.
Some journals in the field seem to like Latex submissions (specifically some from Kluwer), because they do their typesetting in Latex. Most conference proceedings, on the other hand, prefer MS Word.
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LaTeX is being used in the Risk Management and Insurance Department (recently) at Georgia State University, Georgia, US. It is being used by PhD students who need to publish papers. Besides that MS Word is pretty strong.
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I'm not really in a position to be counted because I still haven't been able to decide on which implementation of TeX to use and my toe-dipping into a couple of applications hasn't been at all successful, but I'm hoping to choose a suitable app and use it for a book I have planned, a school edition of the _Gospel of John_ in Latin. I've completed a school edition of the _fabulae_ of the Latin mythographer Hyginus about which I'm in negotiation with Bolchazy-Carducci.
I wrote the Hyginus book in AppleWorks, but then converted it to Mellel to use Unicode (the long vowels are marked and Unicode seemed the simplest way to do that, especially with long y's). Mellel lets you have multiple footnote streams, which might be handy if I eventually despair of figuring out EDMAC and ConTeXt.
I posted to the Classics e-mail list a few months ago to ask if anyone had advice on TeX, and got back only one response, a positive one, from a man in Germany. I don't get the impression that it's widely used in the Classics community in the U.S.
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In math: nearly every one uses (La)TeX I believe.
A new software is being adopted by some people: TeXmacs;
See http://www.TeXmacs.org/ for more info.
Main differences with (la)tex
- it's wysiwyg;
- it's very multilingual;
- it has many alternate ways to produce some items (menus; palettes; keyboard shortcuts; latex-type names)
- it manages structured text, eg you should enter 2 * x and not 2 x so that it knows there is a multiplication even if it won't display it; important for the following point
- it can interact with computer algebra systems; that's *very nice*: you can send nice-looking input to such systems and get nice-looking output too instead of having to cope with painful terminal-like interface; you can copy and paste from one computer algebra system to another...
- about structured text again: internally the structure is that of a tree;
- can export to many formats, producing very nice source code: LaTeX, HTML, ... (La)TeX routines were re-programmed and many were improved eg when there is subscript in one line and superscript in the following, line-spacing will adapt according to whether the superscript is just below the subscript...
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My impression is that it is fairly common to some extent in mathematical sciences, especially math and computer science (also physics and the like). Many, perhaps even most, technical journals accept contributions in TeX format; some even require it.
There are certainly TeX users in the humanities and social sciences as well, although far less than in math. There are of course also lots of users (the majority, I suspect) outside of academia altogether.
Finally, I believe TeX is used much more widely (as a percentage) for typesetting in languages other than English. TeX has been made to work with a vast number of languages around the world, often in areas not "marketable" enough for Microsoft to care about.
Unfortunately I don't have any numbers for you, though. Counting the number of TeX users is an ongoing project.
Has MS Word got its peculiar and inexplicable monopoly everywhere?)
Unfortunately, it is true that a large number of mathematicians and others do use MS Word. I'm not sure how many journals use it for actual publications.
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I use it for general publishing of white papers, brochures (using minipage), web sites (via tex4ht), letters, recipes, ah, pretty much anything you might do with a word processor or simple page layout program. I see no reason why it could not be used for magazines, but that would require very careful setup of templates so you could get your work done in a reasonably amount of time. I am also working on a couple of books. I would like to learn ConTeXt, having had a brief look at it at TUG2003, but have not had the time to pursue it much since early August. :(
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I have no idea if you've gotten 10 responses or 1000, but here's my two cents:
I'm in physics, and, as I'm sure you know by now, the math abilities are the best in (la)tex. I am almost finished with my Ph.D. and did my thesis in TeX, since I am fairly persnickety and even LaTeX won't do some things I want my thesis to do.
You probably heard a lot of microsoft-bashing already, but in most of the journals I see, latex and word templates are handed out and either document is accepted. Admittedly, word is getting better with most upgrades at reproducing equations, but a trained eye can still easily recognize a "word" equation as not as pleasing as a well-typeset or a (la)tex-set equation.
I find that there are mostly two camps of people: those of us that will die before giving up (la)tex...and those that don't care that much and want to just get the job done quickly. The latter one-by-one switch from latex to word and rarely switch back. Most people in my discipline are at least experienced with both.
PS: One thing about word that I hate as much as its equations is its "assistance" with placing figures.... I will often spend over an hour getting figures to stay in one place, since word wants to think it knows better than I where they should go, but they end up on top of each other or three pages away from their reference, etc, etc.
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I think it depends entirely on the environment. I get many MS word files. I think in medicine people take it for granted that everyone has installed MS word. So I need MS word in this context. I write in latex but all my documents I send out are pdf's, nothing else. On rare occasions if I now the document needs changes I use rtf file format.
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I'm a young math professor, and LaTeX is pretty common among my peers from graduate school. I've noticed that many of the more senior professors I come into contact with either don't use TeX at all, or only use it through WYSIWYG-type programmes; I'm a fan of direct coding myself. Of course, most of them also draw upon the services of the department secretaries, who tend to do the actual TeXing.
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo in Canada, the undergraduate math "newspaper" used a somewhat nightmarish layout system that had LaTeX as the markup language. (The nightmarish part came in with the layout proper, which involved manipulating PS files.) We switched away from that gradually during my last year there (98-99), in favour of an XML-based system that made web conversion easier and let the editors use PageMaker for layout.
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> It would be useful for me to have a vague sense of who uses TeX in its various forms.
I work in physics. I'd say all important journals in my field accept LaTeX. In fact most will charge an arm and a leg if you submit in another format.
Some fields of physics (atmospheric physics is one field in which I have experienced this) will use Word (for an abstracts book of a summerschool).
> and how many people use it (eg is it extremely common in maths? or > rare? Has MS Word got its peculiar and inexplicable monopoly > everywhere?)
I'd say using LaTeX is second nature of anyone currently publishing in physics.
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I use LaTeX for creative writing. I still think it's easier than MS Word. Plain text can be quickly converted to LaTeX documents and then again quickly to PDF. You and concentrate on the quality of your writing and not on which font is used where and how to lay out the margins. It does what a word processor should do. I live in a multi-operating system world and LaTeX is available for all of them.
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There are a few Indian philogists and S. Asianists using Tex-LaTeX. Documents (incl. critical editions, edmac) have been published in the scripts of Bengali, Devanagari, Sinhala, Tamil et al (romanized also). Eg:
edmac <http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/edmac/index.html>
Moksopaya <http://www.indologie.uni-halle.de/forschung/Moksopaya/typesetting.htm>
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a few more links for this area:
a search of the archives of INDOLOGY should show interest from Indologists and Buddhologists:
<http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/indology.html>
see also Fukuda's site for use by a Tibetologist:
<http://tibet.que.ne.jp/index-e.html>
also Corff's for use with Mongolian:
<http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~corff/im/MLS/montex.html>
and then Hanneder's site for use with utf-8:
<http://www.indologie.uni-halle.de/software/utf.htm>
then there is John's Smith's Indological ftp archive:
ftp://bombay.oriental.cam.ac.uk/pub/john/
and so on ...
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I'm a mathematician. I don't think any research preprints are ever produced in anything but TeX or LaTeX.
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I am a writer and while I have Appleworks and Microsloth I only very rarely use the word processors. I used LaTex to produce a book about Solar Power on CD. LaTex was what made it possible for cross platform use as everyone can open PDF's. All my writing is now done with LaTex. I can't think of a better tool for the job.
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It's big in physics.
For example, the APS prefers its macro package to Word:
<http://publish.aps.org/esubs/guidelines.html#fileformat>
www.arXiv.org, the big preprint server:
<http://arxiv.org/help/submit#text>
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I know you've received a lot of responses but I thought I'd add mine. I am in chemical engineering and a heavy latex user. In my field latex is used by some, mostly by people who have to typeset a lot of math. I would estimate that maybe 10-20% of people in chemical engineering use it (I can't even make all of my students use it...) However, all of the journals where I publish accept latex.
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You've probably gotten many responses from mathematicians, but here's another. For academic mathematicians, use of (La)TeX for writing article manuscripts is pretty near universal. I would guess that about 95% of all such articles are written in (La)TeX.
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*I* use LaTeX for all my writing, books and articles included. *All* my senior (and former senior) students do, as do some of my less hide-bound colleagues in my department. It's like a benevolent virus: once I started using it, it has spread among my students and colleagues, who, in turn, have infected the graduate and other departments they have moved to. ...
I forgot to mention in my previous post that I explicitly reject all attachments from colleagues that are in MS Word format; I email them back that I consider Word documents to be pernicious, evil viruses and refuse to open, never mind read them. When they ask ``What else?'', I direct them to LaTeX with the promise to help them set it up (on *any* system); a few have taken up the offer, and now proselytise LaTeX themselves.
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I use LaTeX (and some ConTeXt) to create legal pleadings, client letters, briefs, etc. To me, LaTeX's greatest strength is its file format - plain text. This makes it very easy to generate documents from my FileMaker databases using AppleScript.
I note that MS Word owns the legal market, however. When I need to send a client a draft document, I often send a Word document. Sometimes, though, I send it in plain text because "it's just a draft".
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I am using LaTeX on Mac OS X since Dec2001 when I started to write my German u-grad thesis. Now I am using it for basically everything, letters, papers, "How-to's", thesis... It's much easier and a lot more versatile than Word. I know that quite a lot of people in Geophysics use LaTeX worldwide, a number of the main journals accepts LaTeX, in Geology it is not common at all, Word dominates (at least what I know from Germany & Australia). In Geosciences I guess the usage of LaTeX is still quite tied to the people using Unix/Linux/OS X or come from a Unix background. One major disadvantage compared to word is that you don't have the "workgroup" ability to track changes in a mixed OS environment.
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(La)TeX is absolutely ubiquitous in theoretical physics. It is THE universal standard. If you're writing theoretical physics papers in Word, odds are you're a crank. (Not a value judgement, an empirical observation. I cannot EVER recall seeing a paper in Word format that was NOT by a crank.) The entire archive system at arXiv.org is in essence organized around it. --------------------------------------------------------
am a teacher (math and chemistry) in Germany. I use LaTeX (in the beginning OzTeX, later Textures, now iTeXMac and TeXShop) for all my letters, worksheets, reports - to be honest: For everything.
I do have Word on my eMac, but I only use it to read docs sent to me and for school reports (I am not clever enough to print in the form with LaTeX).
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I use ConTeXt for most of the work that doesn't have to be submitted in M$ Word. After years of anger at the poor performance of Word, I decided to switch to TeX when I first discovered TeXShop. For a while, I worked with LaTeX, but ConTeXt seemed so much more powerful taht I tried to switch several time. What made the step difficult was ConteXt's lack of support for classical Greek. I painfully wrote all the necessary files myself, tweaked the fonts, and now I use ConTeXt for the handouts in my classes, my talks, my lectures etc. As far as I'm aware, I might be the only classicist in the world using it.
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> You must mean ConTeXt since I am using LaTeX. can you give me an idea
> of why it was better for you than other TeX styles? I might follow
> your lead, especially if you have already written the packages:-)
>
>
Right, I meant ConTeXt. I found that in order to do even the most simple things in LaTeX, you had to load a dozen packages, some of them mutually exclusive. LaTeX is written by engineers/scientists for engineers/scientists; out of the box, it defines too many things in a manner that the authors thought "right." If you want to change them, you sometimes have to go to extraordinary lengths. E.g., I wanted my lists "packed," but in LaTeX, you had to find out that the only way to do this was to use a new package (I think it was mdwlist), then find out how to use it. In ConTeXt, so many more things are just in the core packages; you have an amazing number of options to change the default behavior. I also found the documentation that came with teTeX appealing (I bought Lamport and the LaTeX Companion for LaTeX and still had unanswered questions) and the commands easier to learn. So yes, give ConTeXt a try, I think it is definitely worth it. As for packages: all I did was tweak a couple of Greek fonts so they work with ConTeXt. If you need to write Greek or are just curious, I'd send it out to you. In fact, I was thinking about making these files publicly available, but right now, they're still in kind of a beta stage, so it would be good to have a tester.
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you asked 1. "who uses TeX in its various forms…" and 2. "Has MS Word got its peculiar and inexplicable monopoly everywhere?"
To 1.: I am teacher for mathematics at a grammar school. I have discovered LaTeX about four years ago and have converted completely - now I write nearly everything, even letters, in LaTeX.
To 2.: Unfortunately, most of my collegues (about 70%) use M$-Software, especially the monster-text-program. The rest uses RagTime, I am the only one using LaTeX. To export files, I use pdf; now and then rtf.
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Publishers.
In the publishing world, Word ---or any word processor--- has no part ---except as a format for authors' manuscripts. The only alternatives to (La)TeX are programs like InDesign or QuarkXPress (and, less used, FrameMaker and PageMaker).
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My mother is a latin and greek teacher. I made her use LaTeX and now she says that she wouldn't use any other software. She typesets lessons, exercises, correction grids, etc. for her students (with a lot of things written in greek).
She uses the multido package a lot as well as thing like \dotfill, multicol that are very handy to typeset exercises.
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I've been teaching for the last four years at the classics department of the University of Berne, Switzerland. I'm using TeXShop and the very useful Diogenes search-tool. To my great pleasure some students have adopted these tools and couldn't imagine going back to MS Word.
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I use LaTeX for writing books (novels, monographs) as well as correspondence and presentation scripts).
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I am a political scientist (working on my Ph.D. paper at the moment), and unfortunately I have to say that TeX is not very common in the humanities, at least here in Germany.
I have tried to convince several people to use it -- everybody who saw my documents was fascinated by their look, and everybody understood the enormous advantages of BibTeX when you have to cope with large bibliographies, like we usually do. I didn't manage to convince all of them hovever...
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I am a philosopher of science (grad student), and laTeX is used by a fair percentage of philosophers of science (especially physics and mathematics), as well as by logicians. Of those using something else, I believe that most use MS Word. One of the primary journals in our field, Philosophy of Science, prefers Word files because their publisher has a set of Templates that are applied to each submission before publication.
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Like [...], I'm a theoretical linguist (also like him and many other linguists a once-upon-a-time mathematician) who uses LaTeX for virtually everything. I wouldn't bother with a simple "me too" comment, but in light of Jason's comment that Cambridge University Press "normally use XML, [but] they are happy to receive LaTeX documents" I thought I'd share an experience.
Last year, David [...] and I published "The Language Organ" with CUP. The manuscript was prepared in LaTeX over their expressed preference for M$ Word, because I really can't (and won't) do big projects in Word. In addition to the computer files (with all relevant macros, etc.), they wanted a hard copy, which they promptly shipped off to India to be typeset. When it finally came out, after various delays caused by shipping things back and forth between India and the UK (including the loss in the post at one point of the corrected manuscript), I discovered that the system the Indian typesetters had used to produce it was -- LaTeX2e. --------------------------------------------------------
Hi. Plenty have already shared their LaTeX uses and experiences (many of them coinciding), but I thought that adding mine wouldn't hurt. I am a young physics undergraduate student in the South American country Venezuela (living in Caracas, the capital city), and I have to say that at least in my school any other format/language is largely frowned upon. In fact, LaTeX is preferred so much above any others that other TeX related formats like PlainTeX and ConTeX are largely unknown by every one, sometimes even including the strong LaTeX supporters.
I hear that this situation, in general, repeats itself through out the entire physics community around my country. But I do have to say, unfortunately, that at least as far as I have been able to see, outside the physics community LaTeX is mostly unknown or, at best, thought to be only for the geeky crowd. This is particularly true, much to my amazement and dismay, in both the Computer Science and Engineering communities. I think that here in my country both of them are really outdated and archaic, when compared to the modern trends in the rest of the world; for instance, large crowds of engineers that I know or have been in contact with in any way know little or close to nothing about LaTeX and UNIX systems, therefore using nothing else but Windows to write documents and perform large numerical calculations in areas like structural engineering (needless to say, these take quite long because of how unreliable the Windows OS can be); similarly, the Computer Science school (right next to mine) is largely DOS and Windows centered, and regardless of how unbelievable it can be it has been us physicists who have had to tutor them when it comes to UNIX systems and networks (that causes me both laughter and grief, it is my country after all!!).
Now, if you try to go out of scientific areas here seeking LaTeX experiences, you'll get the usual "how can you use a condom to write documents in a computer?" remark, seriously!! (I'm sure plenty of us have heard similar things before).
So, that's more or less the picture here. My current goal is to introduce my mother, a Sociologist and Historian, to the wonderful world of LaTeX by re-writing her Post Doctorate thesis and making her aware of the great alternatives to ... Word. Let's see how that goes!!
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I use LaTeX for Graeco-Arabic stuff. ArabTeX and the teubner package with the excellent cbgreek fonts. I also use EDMAC for small editions of Arabic texts.
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In the academic electrical engineering community it comes down to individual academic departments or even individual research groups. LaTeX is very popular amongst theoreticians, but the more practically-minded tend to use Word, even for papers with the same level of mathematical content. At conferences in my own specialty of electrical power systems, perhaps 90% of papers will have been produced in Word (and it's very easy to spot the difference!). In control theory, which tends to be more mathematically focussed, it can be the other way around.
My perception is that those engineers who do their technical writing in LaTeX have been introduced to it during their undergraduate study, and/or encouraged to use it at postgrad level. If there isn't an existing culture of LaTeX use in their faculty to impress the idea on them, students will default to writing everything in Word and will persist once they become academics themselves. You really need explicit encouragement to get over that initial learning curve. At the same time, I don't think you'd get away with insisting students write in LaTeX unless this has the status of written or tacit departmental policy, or you run your own research group. :-)
My own rule with anything I write is that if it can't be done in TextEdit, I'll use LaTeX. Although use of Word is common in my field, there are very few forums that won't accept a PDF as an alternative to a Word document. Most (though not all) academic engineers are at least aware that not everyone uses Word, even if they routinely use Word themselves.
But it's interesting that this wasn't always my rule: until I got my OS X box a few years ago, I'd use LaTeX just for mathematically-oriented documents and Word for everything else. But the fact that OS X includes a native RTF editor means that I now avoid using Word for anything other than what other people send me. And it means that there's a class of documents - those requiring a bit more typesetting sophistication than TextEdit is capable of, though non-mathematical - that I would once have written with Word but now do in LaTeX.
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I know of only two of us in marketing, a subdiscipline of commerce, using LaTeX, though I believe that many Germans and Austrians use it too.
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- I am a mechanical engineer and work in the field of industrial water purification
- I use LaTeX for work, mostly
- We are a small company doing engineering consulting for water treatment and also sell products in this field
- We use LaTeX for: quotations, reports, user's manuals, presentations, fax, letters, internal procedures, invoices, etc.
- I do not know a single other company in the field (among competitors, suppliers, clients) which uses LaTeX
- We have to train employees on LaTeX, as LaTeX users are rare and far in between
- All our clients/suppliers/competitors use M$ Word under M$-Windows
- All those people regularly express admiration about our documents and ask us if they can get the M$ Word template we have used (or the M$ PowerPoint model)
- Often clients make comments about "you people wasting time to write reports using a strange software" and I have difficulties explaining that in fact to write long and complex documents LaTeX allows us to work MUCH faster
- Often clients / suppliers send us M$ Word files and we have use OpenOffice to open them
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Here are a few more tidbits for you.
I have been using LaTeX since graduate school and I have continued to use it for courses (course handouts, homework assignments, exams, etc.) and research papers since leaving almost 10 years ago. Two years ago, Francesco Costanzo (a friend and colleague in my department) and I introduced a new course at our university that introduces students to many aspects of technical document creation using LaTeX. In addition, as part of the course, we created a Pennsylvania State University thesis class file for students who wish to write their thesis (bachelors, masters, or doctoral) in LaTeX. We'd like to think we have converted at least a couple of people to LaTeX. :-)
About a year and a half ago, we started writing statics and dynamics texts* with a colleague at the University of Wisconsin. The colleague at Wisconsin had a head start on us and was using Word. We insisted on collaborating with him using LaTeX, so we were forced to make his transition as painless as possible. We converted one of his chapters to LaTeX and by using this as an example, he was up and running very quickly. One unexpected benefit of this was that we cut his use of bad words down by a factor of 10 after he stopped using Word. :-) We have created the entire layout from scratch using the book class. This includes dozens of commands and environments that we have had to create. Our publisher is McGraw-Hill and I must say that they were impressed by what we had created -- impressed enough that the preliminary edition and possibly the first edition will be done from our LaTeX output.
As for the people we work with, of the 38 people that you can find on the faculty web page of my department, a total of 5 or 6 use LaTeX on a regular basis. This is actually a better percentage that I thought we had and I am curious how it compares with other engineering departments at universities.
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I'm doing a PhD in linguistics and am using LaTeX to write my thesis. I'm writing a grammar of a language of Papua New Guinea, so I guess I'm in a different category from the theoretical linguists who have already replied. Probably about half of the PhD linguists students here at the moment are using LaTeX (five of us), but I think that's a recent aberration, unfortunately. But hopefully it'll continue.
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I am using LaTeX.
I'm a classical philologer at the University of Berne, Switzerland. I'm using TeXShop and the very useful Diogenes search-tool.
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I just added myself to the list today, although I have been using LaTeX for about 5 years; initially as a teaching aid in my math classes: writing tests, quizzes, class notes, etc.; then for writing my masters thesis. I am currently working freelance in the publishing industry doing LaTeX compositing for a small technical publishing company. In this capacity I have seen a fairly broad range of uses for TeX. A lot of math books (of course), recently a physics book and a communications modeling book. Each of these have been books with heavy equation typesetting needs. However, I have also seen it used for a Philosophy Dissertation and a computer How To book. In the former case at least, its use was purely an act of rebellion against Microsoft Word. : ) Hope that helps.
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As a PhD student and cryptologic researcher, I use LaTeX for just about all of the writing that I do (I was also using Prosper to create all of my presentations before Keynote+Equation Service came along). Where I work, just about all of the other crypto folk use LaTeX to prepare their papers and notes -- although I recently finished a paper with one fellow who does all of his writing in Word. I prepared my sections in LaTeX and sent it to him to convert it to Word (although I offered to do it the other way around) -- I tried to do things in Word, but having to stop and think about how to do superscripts, footnotes, etc. was just too much to bear. And I didn't even want to consider creating all of my mathematical notation in MS's Equation Editor . These days I can type math in LaTeX almost as fast as I can write it with a pencil and paper...
So you can chalk me (and at least five others) up as cryptographers that regularly use LaTeX.
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I use it simply because it's the only way to get a decent printout of Japanese text, except probably InDesign J which however is not so affordable ;-)
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I use LaTex to write papers in philosophy. Currently, I'm using it to write my PhD dissertation. My impression is that I'm very much in the minority in this respect; I'd guess that over 90% of philosophers use MS Word. The particular area of philosophy in which I work, which overlaps broadly with certain areas of economics, and hence involves a degree of formalisation, is more suited to LaTex than most areas in philosophy. (I have a friend who works in the same area and insists on using Word to write his equation-laden papers; what a nightmare!)
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>> However, all of the journals where I publish accept latex. > > > Hi, thanks. Do the journals also accept Word (etc)? I wonder what > they then convert to... >
I'm pretty sure they accept Word too. But I am glad to see that many publishers now supply latex style files for submission to their journals. Personally, I was impressed to see from the follow-ups to your email how many people outside the mathematical sciences are using latex. In my mind latex was synonymous with math.
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I've found the posts on this subject to be most interesting. I'll add a contribution.
I'm a mathematician who has been using LaTeX since the early nineties. I wrote my dissertation on a Mac SE II using an early version of Word and I've regretted it ever since. I cringe whenever I pull out that dissertation, it is so ugly-looking. Word's inability to deal with mathematics, an inability which Word still has, led me to a purchase of Textures. When OS X came around, I switched to TeXShop which I find to be a great piece of software.
My department is a mixture of mathematics, English, and social science academics who all use Word (except me). I've tried to convince my collegues of the superiority of TeX, but so far none have switched. I don't have any MS software on my iBook, so I'm forced to translate the numerous DOC documents I receive, with mixed results I might add. I'm now on a mission to convince my colleagues that they should send others either text, HTML, or PDF files instead of those pesty DOC files. Some have complied while others give me hard copies instead.
I use LaTeX to produce all of my documents. Through the years I've defined many document styles that I now use over and over again. Writing an exam is simple for me, my only concern is the exam content as the format is taken care of by LaTeX.
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I'm going to sacrifice myself here as the person who gets 'beat up'. I am a mathematician, and I 'grew up' on TeX while writing my dissertation. Later, I looked at LaTeX, but elected to stay with TeX. I like some things about LaTeX, but I enjoy the full freedom of TeX. LaTeX is *nothing* like Microsoft Word in terms of making decisions for you, but whenever you decide to use macros instead of building from scratch, you do lose some choice. In my department, the vast majority use LaTeX but a few of us use plain TeX. Only the faculty member in Mathematics Education (who naturally has a lesser need for symbols) uses a regular word processor (AppleWorks), and even he has used TeX on occasion.
While we are speaking of LaTeX, I would like to get a reading on the pronunciation of LaTeX from you all. I say 'law-tech', and I hear some say 'lay-teks' (as in latex paint). I try to convert the lay-teks people to law-tech by explaining that TeX is pronounced 'tech', and so LaTeX should be pronounced 'law-tech', but I am not always successful.
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Woo-hoo! TEX!
I responded to the orginal question privately, and I wasn't going to provide my public "introduction," but the last message from the guy using straight tex inspired me...
I use tex too! For the same reasons. I was writing my undergrad thesis (I'm in experimental (accelerator) physics, by the way) and for a couple of reasons (I forget exactly, but I had some double-space and some figure placement/reference issues) that I could get tex to do but somehow latex wasn't able to work it out (I'm sure latex can, and it was me that was having issues).
Also the texbook explains _everything_, whereas the latex manuals seems to only give the introduction. I was (and am) very anal with how everything looks, and tweaking tex I find easier than latex. I'm almost done with my Ph.D. thesis, also in tex.
Word has gotten better with equations, but it's still not perfect, and I have to bend over backward to get it close to (la)tex. My main beef with word is figure-placement... it's so eager to "help," that figures so easily go on top of each other, in a different position on a completely different page, who knows where (I have to hunt around to find them). Heaven forbid I edit a paragraph, cuz they will all bounce around willy-nilly again. Aargh! I can easily spend two hours on a short word paper doing nothing but trying to get figures where I want them.
Also, I either say /LAY-teck/ or, if I'm feeling especially pedantic, /LAY-tecchh/.
Around me, more and more people use word, "cuz I want to get it done and move on to something else." Making it beautiful is a goal with only a few of my colleagues. I, too, use word for letters and other quick non-math stuff... especially that might want formatting.
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It should be pronounced "lay-tech." To me "law-tech" sounds like what they call Louisiana Tech University.
I am a mathematician working in the Risk Management Department of a business school. We have about 20 economists, actuaries, and legal scholars in the department. I am the only faculty member using LaTeX, but I require my PhD students to learn it and to write their papers with LaTeX.
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I'll go with "lay-tech", I just don't like the 'teks' at the end of the other pronunciation (as in latex paint). When I say "law-tech", it isn't as strong on the 'w' as "law-tech" looks, I was just having trouble showing how to pronounce it while typing. I pronounce the 'la' in "LaTeX" as the 'l' is pronounced in "do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do".
I apologize for the mindless letter and subtopic.
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> It should be pronounced "lay-tech." To me "la[h]-tech" sounds like > what they call Louisiana Tech University.
Here, here! (Roll Tide!).
I suppose I'll throw in my bio and un-lurk for a minute.
I am a political science graduate student and computer lab manager at Emory University. I started using LaTeX about a year ago because of Excel's crummy tables. I was sucked in immediately (I used to do desktop publishing, so much of the terminology was familiar), and since Political Science is using quantitative methods and game theory more and more, TeX has proven much more useful than I expected. Now I'm working on a few perl scripts to reformat LaTeX tables from Stata's `outtex' package.
I know a good number of political scientists are using LaTeX now (still a small percentage, though see
<http://polmeth.wustl.edu/tpm/TPMSP02.pdf>
on page 16 for proof the evangelists are out there); the majority certainly use Word or WordPerfect.
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I use latex because it has more capabilities than any other system I know of, except perhaps Quark, which is very expensive. For our publishing, the index features, including multiple indices and multiple bibliographies are two very important features I don't know how to get anywhere else. Another factor is storage cost. The .tex files are so small in comparison to other formats. There is not really a cost advantage in comparison with Microsoft Word because TeX requires quit a learning curve. So cost is not the main reason, it is simply a question of quality and features.
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LaTeX's manual has a few lines on how all variants are legitimate, pronunciation being determined by use, not fiat. The most frequent interpretation of LateX is "lazy TeX", others are "Lamport's TeX" (Leslie Lamport being the author of LaTeX 2.09), or even "L.A. TeX", and possibly many others that I'm not aware of. I must also confess that I could never get the pronunciation of latex (= rubber) right in English!
In any case I must also say, as others have said in this thread, that I prefer by far plain TeX to LateX, for its elegance, its loose but precise style, its concision and freedom. As most people, I use LaTeX most of the time, because of its facilities for graphics inclusion, multilingual hyphenation, font choice and size change, and the hyperref package, and also for the journal and publisher styles around, but I've always regretted that I have had to give up on plain TeX for this. I do hope that ConTeXt will be able (once with a more extensive documentation and integration of functions similar to the amsmath package) to bring us the best of both worlds.
> Around me, more and more people use word, "cuz I want to get it done
> and move on to something else." Making it beautiful is a goal with
> only a few of my colleagues. I, too, use word for letters and other
> quick non-math stuff... especially that might want formatting.
That's exactly the point. Practically everybody around me (a fluid mechanics research department) consider that paying attention to form (or even spelling) just shows that you have too much time on your hands, and indicates inefficiency. Thus TeX, as a rule, is considered as unnecessary and Word appropriate and good enough for getting the job done. There are one or two (La)TeX converts that I've been able to make, but even them return to Word as soon as they have some pressure or a short deadline.
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Another political scientist here... I'm a graduate student at the University of Michigan. I started using LaTeX about two years ago after a friend sat me down at a computer and insisted that I try it out (I thought he was a bit nuts at first). Slowly, I used it for more and more projects until I dumped Word completely. My dissertation will be entirely in LaTeX (I really love the bibliography management capabilities). Like Jesse, the political scientist from Emory who wrote earlier today, I use quantitative methods (mostly econometrics) for research and find Word far too cumbersome and ugly for presenting equations and results. LaTeX users are certainly a minority in this field, but I've noticed quite a few political science papers written in LaTeX recently. An upward trend?
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I work in an epidemiology and biostatistics unit in a public hospital. I would guess that some of the statisticians here use LaTeX whenever they can while others are more reliant on Word (but could use LaTeX if forced to). The people from clinical or public health backgrounds seem to use Word exclusively. Most of the documents that are circulated electronically in this unit are in Word format (sometimes converted from LaTeX) or PDF. It is currently an all-Windows shop, sadly.
My personal background is more eclectic. While doing undergraduate study in history I embraced the free software philosophy, installed Linux on my PC and learned LaTeX with the help of LyX. At work I've been using MikTeX, and when I bought a Mac a few months ago (something I never would have contemplated before OS X came along), I installed Gerben Wierda's TeX distribution and TexShop. I have been using jurabib to display my references (as footnotes! :-) ) and bibliographies in humanities-friendly format.
I may be studying some statistics next year so finally I'll have a reason to get acquainted with math mode.
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> > > Or is it mainly just pragmatically using whatever the
Department/Univ
> > > provides, or whatever can do the specific tasks?
> >
> > It's probably just a matter of familiarity. The major paradigm
> > shift in non-mathematical disciplines was from handwritten or typed
> > manuscripts to commercial word processors. Most of the early word
> > processors had more in common with Word than with TeX-based
> > systems, manuscripts to commercial word processors. Most of the
> > early word processors had more in common with Word than with
> > TeX-based systems, and so migration from these other word
> > processors to Word was a comparatively small step. This is part of
> > the reason why Word so dominates the market now (the other part
> > being its ubiquitous availability as pre-installed software on PCs).
> >
>
> ... which describes the general situation rather well, so is good to
> have on record along with this thread.
>
I would add to the above that there is less impetus towards *TeX solutions in much of academic philosophy because of the relativly low amount of formal mathematics/symbolism outside of a few specialities. Without the need to write something that points out the weaknesses of a word-processor, moving to TeX isn't going to be perceived as being worth the effort by most people.
> However, my question was specifically in regard to the "philosophy"
> aspect being picked-up within the Philosophy community. I'd like to
> know whether that has any serious impact, or whether it is treated
> like any other kind of 'hype', and largely ignored.
>
I guess that I more-or-less count as a philosopher (I'm a PhD student in the department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, USA-we're a single department, roughly divided between historians of science and philosophers of science, one of which am I), so I'll speak to this (some of this repeats material sent via e-mail in response to the original question):
In the field of philosophy of science, there are some who use LaTeX, particularly those who study physics, mathematics, etc. (i.e. people who study fields where TeX/LaTeX is used, and for the same reasons. Myself, I began using LaTeX because I haven't been happy with Word since 5.1 for the Mac, and while MarinerWrite is a good program, it's no more compatible than any other non-MS word-processor. Neither program handles equations very well, and I'm not particularly happy with the way that they do super- or sub-scripts or footnotes. Since I can distribute my stuff in PDF form, I'm no less compatible than I would be with any other non-MS solution, with all the advantages of LaTeX.
As to the "philosophy" of free software, academic philosophy is divided into many specialities, most of which don't deal with this sort of issue (e.g. metaphysics, epistemology, ancient phil., phenomenology, etc.). I would imagine that among philosophers in the specialities that do deal with similar issues, some of them examine the free software "philosophy," but I don't really know, as that's not my field.
[snip]
In my own department, I believe that most of the faculty (we've got 8 at the moment) use Word, one uses Linux with some non-MS word-processor, and one (who studies philosophy of quantum mechanics) uses LaTeX. I'm the only grad student (among 24 or so) who uses LaTeX in our department.
In the philosophy department at IU, I know of one philosopher who uses LaTeX; he's a logician. Some of his students use it as well, but I don't think that it's very popular over there otherwise.
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I am a grad student studying Actuarial Science in a Risk Manamgement Department. I got introduced to LaTeX while pursuing my undergraduate studies in Mathematics and Computer Science. Havent seen anything which comes close to it in terms of price/performance. I still use it and am teaching some PhD students how to use it to write their papers.
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I am an Electronic Engineer. I used LaTeX up until 2 years ago when OS X enabled me to switch to ConTeXt. I use context due to the perceived better integration with MetaPost also the additional packages are (I think) more likely to work together. Backgrounds and other tools are making this suite capable of moving the boundaries between Publishing tools and TeX.
I have produced all the documentation for our new product. Nicely presented and small with a mixture of jpg, png, mp, eps, pdf pictures incorporated in the pdf documents which are all interlinked from an initial ReadMe.pdf. Cross references URLs appearing in multiple documents all appear as a result of one assemble command for all the documents in letter, A4, screen, US english and UK english (which does take some time).
I went on holiday and nobody else uses TeX they converted the main Handbook to Word. Apart from it looking awful it is now 5 times as big and Low resolution due to Word's apparent inability to incorporate pictures (drawings and pdfs) from other packages other than as bitmaps and is only in one format (US letter). The source is now not cross platform compatible. Fonts and pictures all get converted before editing.
Yes, I am the only person using a Mac. I originally started using the Mac because of being able to edit wysiwyg documents. That was 1984. Now I concentrate on generating the words, equations and pictures (drawings, photos, graphs, screenshots) first and sort out the look later or simply use a previously generated (corporate) format for the document. --
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Steven wrote:
>> I still don't know why the Mac magazines spend so much time on Quark but never mention LaTex.
and Joseph replied:
> $. Quark pays for adds, LaTeX doesn't. This also causes Quark to be more visible.
To be fair, a listmember, Adrian ... managed to get a nice writeup on LaTeX into the Australian edition of MacWorld.
It's also a bit more complex than just Quark paying money for ads---Quark provides review copies, has an established userbase, and at a time when TeX users were still building interfaces to proprietary typesetting systems Quark was seeding the then nascent service bureau industry with copies.
Quark also matches the mindset of the typical graphic designer better than TeX does---though this has changed somewhat w/ the broad acceptance of HTML (and now XML). It's also much easier to find people who've worked in Quark than LaTeX, and getting stuff done in Quark is usually more direct (albeit one must then repeat said actions endlessly)---let's not forget that it takes _four_ levels of groups in (Plain) TeX to get a ruled box around something.... Don Hosek's analogy of it being like to playing Chess is quite apt.
The new QT version of LyX though, should be much more palatable ::mental note, write review of LyX::
That said, InDesign steals much of TeX's thunder since it uses TeX's H&J algorithm as the basis for the HZ algorithm Adobe got by way of URW, and it supports Unicode and OpenType directly and fully, things which are still being developed in TeX.
Steven went on to say:
>> Lately, I've been doing all the typesetting in Latex on my
>> Macintosh. The stuff I send to my publishers (McGraw-Hill, Prentice
>> Hall and Marcel Dekker) is then retypeset using LaTex on their
>> machines. There are still occasional typos that reviews pick up, but
>> not nearly as many as when the publishers translated Word documents.
Actually, there are instances of LaTeX documents being translated into Quark---but this is usually done better because it requires specialized tools / knowledge.
and lastly Joseph finished:
> I'd suggest stating somewhere in your book (everyone who publishes)
> that the document was generated using La/Con//TeX. It's the only
> advertising TeX gets.
That's a nice thing to do, and will (usually) keep the document in LaTeX---the author specifying that they want updated TeX source files back will also encourage the publisher to find a company which will work in TeX to do the composition.
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I agree that TeX allows more control than LaTeX, but LaTeX is certainly easier than TeX for a newbie to master. There have been times when LaTeX has frustrated me with its limitations, but I've not had the time to sit down and read through Knuth's The TeXbook. So I'll stick with LaTeX for now, but bashing TeX users is out of the question.
I've been thinking about the LaTeX versus Word learning curve issue. My opinion is that the learning curve for LaTeX is really not that steep. The problem people have when switching from Word to LaTeX is that they are switching paradigms. This paradigm switch goes both ways though. I haven't used a word processor in years, but recently I was confronted with Word on a friend's computer. I felt totally lost, I couldn't get Word to do much of anything. I'd become so used to marking up text files that the WYSIWYG environment appeared to be hostile and inefficient.
I think that the difficulty in switching paradigms is also the reason that many people use WYSIWYG software to write HTML code. For me, HTML was no big deal to learn. Just mark up a text file and "compile" it using a browser. But my colleagues don't want to learn how to markup text, they want to remain in the familiar WYSIWYG environment. Hence, they spend outrageous sums for the software they use to produce simple web pages.
I believe that the text markup paradigm is superior to the WYSIWYG paradigm, but most computer users probably see the issue differently. Thus, I don't see LaTeX usage becoming widespread anytime soon.
WSYIWYG software was allegedly developed to make it "easy" for the average person to use a computer. However, I believe that WYSIWYG software was actually developed in order to disguise the simplicity of the text markup paradigm so that software companies could make big bucks selling defective products to unsuspecting consumers. If proper instruction is available, then marking-up text is no more difficult then using WYSIWYG software. If WYSIWYG is truly easier than text markup, then why do we see the plethora of books published about MS Word?
Using text markup instead of WYSIWYG allows one to use the very powerful features of a good text editor (emacs, BBEdit, etc.). When I examine a program like iMovie, I see a program suffering from debilitating limitations due to its WYSIWYG, drag and drop interface. But Apple is committed to developing such programs because WYSIWYG is the dominant paradigm in the software industry. "Ease of use" is the WYSIWYG slogan, but I contend that text markup, not WYSIWYG, is where real ease of use lies.
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>I agree that TeX allows more control than LaTeX, but LaTeX is
> certainly easier than TeX for a newbie to master. There have been
> times when LaTeX has frustrated me with its limitations, but I've not
> had the time to sit down and read through Knuth's The TeXbook. So
> I'll stick with LaTeX for now, but bashing TeX users is out of the
> question.
Don't bash me! After I read your first sentence, I immediately thought, "No, it's not!" Only after I tried to remove myself from my familiarity with tex, and especially the texbook, did I realize that I think you're right. Fortunately I find the texbook quite amusing, but initially it looks like a big boring manual like every other big boring manuals (microshaft being the king, of course), whereas the cute, thin, pamphlet-containing latex manuals are much more enticing to open up and read.
And let's face it. In word, you can figure out between 80% and 99% of everything by clicking on it and saying, "oh." But all of us _depend_ on our manuals for all (la)tex versions. So the manual better be readable. Hence, I think a lot of people are scared by the mammoth look of the texbook.
For me, I started with latex, but each physics-related document I made was more complicated, and I got more picky, and I kept "stealing" tex commands to get some nuance that lamport didn't talk about. I was doing some multi-page table thing at one point, and the whole // vs. //* gave me problems. And I wanted {article} but with pages that did something else. And equation numbers would look better doing this. My macros got long, and the texbook told me how to cope with if's and cases and counters the way I wanted to use them. Eventually I eliminated the fluff that I was pulling apart anyway, and saved myself two letters (the 'l' and the 'a') on the command line to boot.
> I've been thinking about the LaTeX versus Word learning curve issue.
> My opinion is that the learning curve for LaTeX is really not that
> steep. The problem people have when switching from Word to LaTeX is
> that they are switching paradigms. This paradigm switch goes both
> ways though. I haven't used a word processor in years, but recently I
> was confronted with Word on a friend's computer. I felt totally lost,
> I couldn't get Word to do much of anything. I'd become so used to
> marking up text files that the WYSIWYG environment appeared to be
> hostile and inefficient.
I think you're 75% right. Typing \em is not much harder than clicking on "style:italics" or typing ctrl-I. But there is something that we may forget: it actually took work for us to remember "\em." We would get nowhere without dedicating part of our memory to these names... whereas "everyone" already has memorized "style:italics."
The other obvious advantage is the wysiwyg. Again, we're used to not having it (ie, trusting that \em is what we think it is), but to the beginner, constructive reinforcement is huge for learning something, and what is more immediately gratifying than clicking "style:italics" and instantly seeing exactly what my mind was picturing?
PS: Having read my email through, I wonder if more than 3 of us are actually still interested in this subject enough to read my long, pedantic ramblings.... --------------------------------------------------------
I had already written to Jason off-list, but I wanted to respond to Will's interest in comparing LaTeX & co. and introduce myself a bit. I am a classicist, and I use ConTeXt for most everything I write -- letters, lecture notes, handouts for my students, papers--unless it's specifically requested that the paper needs to be submitted in Word or rtf format, which is quite often the case in the humanities, unfortunately. As far as I can see, I'm the only classicist around using ConTeXt, though I was happy to see that a few people on this list are classicists using LaTeX. In my department, I'm the only teX-person. I'm the chair of the dept, so sometimes I dream I should just force everybody to switch to TeX, but I have to admit if you;re just a non-geeky person, that might be a bit too much...
I wanted to briefly explain why I came to prefer ConTeXt over LaTeX: I began this Odyssey when I first discovered TeXShop and Gerben's i-installer (thanks to both of you!). I started with LaTeX, which I found extremely powerful. I was at that time finishing the camera-ready copy of a book I had written in Word (yes, in German-speaking countries, no editor or publisher will do that for you, you have to fend for yourself!). The result was not too bad, but there were certain things that were just impossible to correct-in Times 10 pt, for example, Word would always squeeze some words at the end of the line so the characters would appear scrambled. That's when I swore I would never again do this in Word but switch to LaTeX.
After the first enthusiastic attempts, I became more and more dissatisfied with LaTeX. I had the impression that it was designed by a very benevolent engineer who thought he knew exactly what every detail should look like. I found it annoying that it was impossible, e.g., to have an enumeration without a blank line before and after it or to have tables split over several pages. After buying and reading the LaTeX-companion, I discovered that there were special packages for almost every problem, but that meant finding and downloading the package, reading the documentation, learning the new commands (and making sure the packages wouldn't clash with each other). Then, I discovered ConTeXt. I found the command structure much more inviting for newcomers than LaTeX's, and ConTeXt gave you much more choices out of the box. E.g., when you want a "packed" enumeration, you just use \setupitemize[n,packed] and that's it. The one problem that kept me from actually switching to ConTeXt was the lack of support for classical Greek. After much experimenting (in the course of which I learned an awful lot about fonts, encodings etc.), I finally solved this problem, and I have almost completed my switch. I still find ConTeXt a lot easier to use and incredibly more configurable than LaTeX. The one BIG drawback is the lack of documentation. You can buy a whole truckload of books for LaTeX. ConTeXt comes with an amazing manual (Hans Hagen, who develops and documents the program, is just incredible!) that's part of Gerben's teTeX, and I would invite everyone to have a look at it. However, a number of features isn't documented at all, and there's no obvious place to go and look them up. There's a mailing list with lots of helpful people, but a number of times, I felt I was unable to take full advantage of all the goodies the program offers.
That's just my two eurocents. I'm still struggling with ConTeXt, and every now and then I will have to go back to LaTeX, but overall, I don't regret having switched, and I would recommend that everyone just have a look at ConText to see if it doesn't suit their needs better than other programs.
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I approach this question a bit differently than the (La)TeXperts on this list. I've been circling and circling TeX and LaTex for some time now trying to get into them, without much luck.
I publish poetry books, which is a somewhat specialized form of typesetting. Right now my workflow is to do basic formatting in a word processor (Word) and then do page layout in a DTP program (InDesign). I am pretty fast with this workflow, but I am getting frustrated with some of the constant difficulties that come with using the DTP process--and I am also getting frustrated with the constant upgrade cycle, product activation, etc. of commercial DTP software. My thinking is that, once I overcome the learning curve, that LaTex will be faster because I can do formatting in a text file and leave the typesetting to the program.
Does anyone else on list have experience with using TeX/LaTex vs. a DTP application, as opposed to vs. a word processor? Is my feeling that typesetting will be streamlined/sped up once I get past the learning curve and define a standard template accurate? Thanks.
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> I'm perhaps the second philosopher I know of to be using LaTeX.
As far as I know, the philosophy department of the University of Utrecht uses TeX and Macs and all students learn TeX.
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OK: maybe your last "who uses LaTeX?" response.
I use it personally, not professionally. A hobby of mine is genealogy, and early in my work on my family's history I committed to keeping the info I found in book form, in a format that in most respects adheres to a standard in the field (someting called "register format"). I started in Word (v5.1, which I still find superior to any of the later Mac versions:, 6, 98, 2000 or X). Quickly I figured that keeping my raw genealogical data in a database might allow for an automated process of updating the genealogy: let the DB do the work of inserting new family members, renumbering the families, changing the dates and places, etc. I was using 4th Dimension at work, so I put together a 4D database suitable to my needs. Then came the problem of emitting the info from the DB and having some formatting engine put it together to make a formatted document. I toyed with the idea of having the DB output an RTF document, but the RTF syntax was kind of opaque. I had known about TeX for years but had never learned it, and a brief look at Lamport's book convinced me that I could get the results I wanted fairly cleanly (modulo my rather daffy coding style in 4D---it works, but I suspect if Knuth ever got a look at it, I'd earn a dope-slap).
The results, such as they are, can be sampled on Gerben's TeX Showcase page. Head to the bottom of that page (I think I'm there so that I'm as far away as possible from the professionally typeset TeX samples).
I now use LaTeX for other purposes: letters, reformatting projects (like: take the html help files from, say, TeXShop, and reformat them into a printable doc, since I am from that ancient generation that still prefers printed docs. Also this is evidence of too much time on my hands), and a variety of other mundane tasks. I am not in a position to use it at my workplace, in spite of being a community college math teacher. Windows is the College standard officially, and the Dell PCs we have come with Word on them: why use anything else? or so I am told. And I am fortunate that I have been able to keep even a wheezing old Mac PPC 7200 running System 7.6.1 on my desk. I don't think that there is anyone else in the college who uses TeX, surely not professionally.
And that's my sad tale. But my genealogy co-workers think my genealogy looks pretty good, and that gives me my will to carry on. That and the fact that an old pal of mine is a physics professor working in quantum computing who also knows TeX, so I can e-mail him an over-formatted note when the mood strikes.
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